Americans have always had a soft spot for flamboyant, devil-may-care criminals and the tales of their escapades and fast living. Add in a doomed love affair, and you’ve really got an enduring hit. The infamous Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were together just a few short years, meeting in January 1930 and dying in a […]
True Crime
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Iowa’s last adult movie theater attracted loners and swingers alike in Waterloo
When my friends and I turned 18 in the early aughts, we decided we were tired of our parents’ basements. We found our new hang on the north side of Cedar Rapids. Sure, Adult Shop North was the place where people in town picked up their lubricants, toys and triple-X movies, but it also had […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
‘I’m comfortable here’: Filmmaker Kristian Day makes documentaries in, and about, Iowa
Des Moines-based storyteller Kristian Day has made a name for himself in the world of media production. His bonafides include creating The Last American Gay Bar, a 2024 docuseries for OUTtv covering The Blazing Saddle in Des Moines, and hosting the show Iowa Basement Tapes on KFMG radio, which aims to preserve local DIY music […]
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Book Review: ‘The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling’ by Rachel Corbett
All through college, and for several years after, I was a self-professed true crime girlie. I suspect my interest sprung from watching CSI with my parents growing, nestled up in the secure monotony of Midwest farmland while learning about decomposition and blood splatter. In my mid-20s, several provoking pieces about survivorhood and a handful of […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
An art writer with a true crime obsession, Rachel Corbett used her new book to delve into the dark history of criminal profiling
In her latest book The Monsters We Make, author and journalist (and Iowa native) Rachel Corbett dives deep into the dark history of criminal profiling as “a tool for social control,” our collective appetite for true crime entertainment and her own personal history with, as she puts it, “an early father-figure [who] committed an unconscionable act of violence.”
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Bumper Crops: Pinball bans and the Des Moines mafia
There was never an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting pinball, but that didn’t stop some major cities from banning the game from the 1930s through the mid-’70s. In fact, Oakland, California still had a ban on pinball machines as recently as 2014. I first learned about pinball’s checkered history after trying to cajole my mom […]
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Peak Iowa: History’s most prolific book bandit is an Ottumwa man. Librarians helped bring him down.
“Organized crime” usually refers to illegal activity as a collaborative enterprise, involving large networks of people and undertaken for profit or power. That’s too damned bad, really, because there is no better turn of phrase to lean on when discussing the wild work of the Guinness World Record holder for Most Prolific Book Thief: Ottumwa’s […]
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Peak Iowa: 175 years of Cedar Rapids history began with a log-cabin tavern run by an outlaw
Cedar Rapids celebrated its 175th birthday in 2024. Iowa had been a state for barely two years when the new city was incorporated on Jan. 15, 1849. Of course, people had been living in the area for thousands of years before that happened. Archeologists have found evidence of habitation dating back 9,500 years. At least […]
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Would you stay overnight at the Villisca Axe Murder House?
On the morning of June 10, 1912, the Villisca, Iowa home of prominent business owner Josiah B. Moore and his family was eerily still. That stillness gave way to a terrible discovery that would shake the small rural community in southwestern Iowa to its roots and live on as one of the most mysterious crimes […]
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Forty years after the Johnny Gosch disappearance, fear continues to fuel conspiracy theories in Iowa and beyond
Listen an audio version of this article here, or using the player at the bottom of the page. On Sept. 20, 1984, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in Cedar Rapids as part of his reelection campaign. In it, he advocated for slashing taxes and “the simple values of faith, family, neighborhood and good, hard […]
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‘Somebody knows something’: $10k reward brings new attention to Iowa City woman’s 1996 cold case murder
Just before 2 a.m. on Oct. 26, 1996, Dan Clyde was driving his truck along Route 136 in Kahoka, Missouri, not far from the Iowa and Illinois borders, when he spotted something strange on the side of the road. Looking closer, he found it was a young woman, unresponsive and near death. Clyde called authorities, […]
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Michelle Martinko’s murder ‘haunted’ the Cedar Rapids community for 40 years. Now, her suspected killer is set to go on trial.
Dec. 19, 2018. Like every year, local news stations ran anniversary pieces describing the cold case of Michelle Martinko, an 18-year-old woman stabbed to death in Cedar Rapids in 1979. The facts of the case were recounted. A tip line scrolled across the bottom of the screen. The weather report would be next, and Martinko’s story would be
